Category: All

All posts across the whole website belong to this category. They might also belong to some other categories as well, but this one holds all of them. Hence the descriptive name – All.

The Microsoft experience

I smiled after reading this post.  It reminded me of the fact that in our office, designers use my laptop to test web sites on Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.  We have two guys doing the designs, and one of the uses Windows Vista, which runs MSIE 7.  Another one uses, I think, Windows XP, but with MSIE upgraded to version 7 too.  I heard it’s possible to have several versions of Internet Explorer running on the same Windows installation, but nobody around here knows how to do it or cares enough to experiment.

But the funniest thing in this whole story is that my laptop is running on Fedora Linux.

My new Gmail

Finally, my prayers have been heard and my Gmail account was upgraded to the newer version.  It is as sweet as was promised.  Message pre-loading makes sorting through mail in morning extremely fast.  New contact manager is indeed much better than the old, dare I say, address book.   It still misses a few things, like fields for URLs.

Now I’m waiting for all those Firefox extensions and Greasemonkey scripts that I use to beautify and customize Gmail to get updated and work with the new version.

The future is expensive. Very expensive.

Again, news from Slashdot:

“The City Car, a design project under way at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is envisioned as a two-seater electric vehicle powered by lithium-ion batteries. It would weigh between 1,000 and 1,200 pounds and could collapse, then stack like a shopping cart with six to eight fitting into a typical parking space. It isn’t just a car, but is designed as a system of shared cars with kiosks at locations around a city or small community.”

Here is one of the ways I see it:

  • most families won’t be able to afford children (“two-seater electric vehicle”)
  • most families won’t be able to afford petrol powered cars (“powered by lithium-ion batterries”)
  • most families won’t be able to afford their own cars (“shared cars”)
  • most families won’t be able to afford parking spaces (“six to eight fitting into a typical parking space”)

I’m glad that science in general and MIT in particular are here to help us survive in the future.

P.S.: by the way, most families won’t be able to afford university education either, so MIT is giving out for free already – MIT OpenCourseWare.

P.P.S.: yes, I’m just kidding.  The stuff linked to from above is cool.

Traces of digital revolution

The digital world is upon us.  Everybody knows it and nobody ever argues with it anymore.  But that’s too general.  What is actually changing?  What are the specific examples?   Today I came across one, while catching up with Slashdot news.  Here is a quote from the post:

 “An inspired professor at University of Washington-Bothell, Martha Groom, made an interesting pedagogical experiment. Instead of vilifying Wikipedia as some academics are prone to do, she assigned the students enrolled in her environmental history course to contribute articles. The result has proven “transformative” to her students. They were no longer spending their time writing for one reader, says Groom, but were doing work of consequence in a “peer reviewed” environment, which enhanced the quality of their output.”

If you read through the comments to the post, there are many insightful thoughts too.  Here is one of those that I liked (apart from the age criteria):

Wikipedia should be output, not input, for students past a certain age. It gets them used to writing for real people as opposed to just for getting graded, it gives them the experience of having their writing edited by people of varying abilities, and it gives them motivation for doing research. Another, easier, option would be to assign students to correct Wikipedia articles.

Another comment mentions that this is not by far the first time that this happens.  It conveniently links to the page with more examples of school and university projects.

Happy birthday, mom!

(For those of you who don’t know, my mother came to Cyprus last Friday for just a few days to celebrate her birthday.  She is back to Moscow today.)

It was one of the shortest visits so far.  The longest one was when Maxim was born.  Ma stayed with us for a month or so.  There were a few two-weeks and 10-days stays.  There were some 1 week stays.  Those felt short, but we had enough time to pack all the fun in.  With 3 days at hand and all the preparations that had to be done for the actual celebration, we still managed to enjoy plenty of time together.

The celebrations were cool too.  A whole bunch of people, up in the hills with plenty of drinks, food, free time, and good mood – that’s a heck of a combination for great time.  It’s a bit sad that it’s over, but  I’m glad we didn’t spoil a second of it.  It was all fun.

Happy birthday mom.  Hope to see you again soon!